‘The Intouchables’ Arrives From France

The Untouchables

Omar Sy, left, and François Cluzet become best pals in spite of their many differences in “The Intouchables.”Credit
Weinstein Company

“Les Intouchables,” having broken box office records in France, arrives in the United States with a faithfully translated title — “The Intouchables” — that is not quite English. American audiences looking for a suitable French name for this ingratiating comedy of cross-racial friendship might settle on “Déjà Vu,” since it is a story we have seen many times before.

Though maybe not quite like this, or at least not in a while. “The Intouchables,” directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano and based on a true story, is about two men — one rich, uptight and white; the other poor, exuberant and black — who become best pals in spite of their differences. In place of the customary spoiler alert I will post a cliché warning, since some of the movie’s groan-inducing turns of plot may require equally groan-inducing turns of phrase. I wish I could say them all in French. Or maybe I don’t.

But anyway. The pallid aristocrat, Philippe (François Cluzet), is paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a hang-gliding accident and lives in a state of opulent ennui attended by a nervous staff and is ignored by his petulant adolescent daughter. He is a difficult boss, and his newest employee, a streetwise hoodlum named Driss (Omar Sy) does not look as though he will last long in the job. Not that Driss has much ambition to play nurse for some grouchy old invalid; he applies for the position only so he can continue to collect government benefits. Moving into Philippe’s mansion, Driss steps away from a background of poverty, family dysfunction and trouble with the police. Under his boss’s stern gaze and imperious tutelage he starts to acquire a work ethic and a sense of discipline. In exchange, he helps Philippe discover his appetite for life and his capacity for joy.

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How does Driss do this? In the usual ways. He flirts shamelessly with the boss’s secretary and gives Philippe’s daughter the stern talking-to she needs. He introduces Philippe to the pleasures of marijuana, encourages him to start dating and loosens up a stuffy chamber-music soiree with some funky music. Sacre bleu! Nothing is funnier than watching a roomful of buttoned-up white people trying to shake their booties. Look at them! It’s like they have no natural rhythm at all.

It is possible to summarize the experience of watching “The Intouchables” in nine words: You will laugh; you will cry; you will cringe. The caricatures are astonishingly brazen, as ancient comic archetypes — a pompous master and a clowning servant right out of Molière — are updated with vague social relevance, an overlay of Hollywood-style sentimentality and a conception of race that might kindly be called cartoonish.

You can easily imagine this movie — you probably have already seen it — with Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy in Mr. Sy’s role. In the post-civil-rights, post-blaxploitation era, entertainments based on the clash of white squareness and black soul had a certain novelty and charm. Nowadays they are more likely to be layered with self-consciousness, winking at their own conventions. (See, for example, “Men in Black III,” which also opens on Friday.)

In the old days the French view of America’s race problem (as it used to be called) was tinged with pity and superiority. African-American artists and intellectuals — Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and too many jazz musicians to name — went to Paris to find respect and relief from the bigotry at home, and many contemporary French observers took this fact as confirmation of their own country’s relative innocence. More recently, as France has grappled with immigration and its rapidly evolving identity as a multicultural society, such smugness has dropped away, and much of the best recent French film and literature grapples earnestly with this new situation.

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What “The Intouchables” does cannot exactly be called grappling, and its genial parade of stereotypes may be more regressive than liberating. It is certainly possible to be offended by the broad, silly aspects of Mr. Sy’s performance. An English-language remake might be perfect for Tracy Jordan of “30 Rock,” the star of such nonexistent, barely exaggerated blockbusters like “Who Dat Ninja” and “Black Cop, White Cop.” But it is equally difficult to resist Mr. Sy’s charm and inventiveness, or to ignore the sensitivity beneath them.

It is too much to say that he and Mr. Cluzet, a crafty and insightful actor, rescue “The Intouchables.” They do provide it with humanity and idiosyncrasy — with the sense that Philippe and Driss might be real people rather than sociological ciphers — but this film can only be described, in the context of French cinema and global popular culture, as an embarrassment.

Given its subject, embarrassment may be both inevitable and forgivable. Race, in France as in the United States, is a perpetual source of confusion and discomfort; to address it is always, in some way, to get it wrong. “The Intouchables” sets out to convert that anxiety into easy laughter and also, like “The Help” and “The Blind Side,” to replace antagonism and incomprehension with comfort and consensus. Like those movies, it courts (and deserves) a skeptical response. Yet it also solicits a warm tolerance that it would be churlish to withhold. The film’s brain is hopelessly addled — if you want to see a smart movie about French society, there are plenty of other choices — but its clumsy heart is somehow in the right place.